Occasionally clunky interface. Noise reduction not as powerful as DxO's or Noise Ninja's.

Bottom Line

Perfectly Clear can make just about any digital photo look better instantly, but its interface could use work.

What if you could push just one button to make your digital photos look better? That's the goal of Athentech Imaging's Perfectly Clear ($149). This photo-editing software, available as a plug-in for Lightroom, Photoshop, and Photoshop Elements, smooths skin on portraits, clears up haze on landscapes and removes noise, red-eye, and color cast. It's a worthy addition to the toolkit of any serious photographer, and amateurs may appreciate it even more.

Setting Up Perfectly Clear

For this review, I'll focus on the pro-level Perfectly Clear Photoshop plug-in. I tested on a 4K-touch-screen-equipped Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10. The software is compatible with Windows 10, 8, 7, and Vista; and there's a version for Mac OS X 10.8 or later. It works with Photoshop versions from CS3 to Photoshop CC, and with Photoshop Elements 8 and up, in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Each of the plug-ins is available as free 30-day, fully functioning trial software. If your workflow is not tied to Photoshop or Lightroom, there's another way to get Perfectly Clear's imaging magic—by purchasing Corel's PaintShop Pro X6 Ultimate, which, for $99 total, includes the plug-in.

Authentech also sells subsets of Perfectly Clear. For Windows there's Perfect Skin for $59 and Perfect Eyes for $49. In the Mac App Store, you'll find Lucid Eyes, Lucid Exposure, Lucid Details, and more, ranging in price from free to $2.99 for Lucid Skin. There are no Windows app store versions of these, but you can get Lucid desktop, a simplified version of the Perfectly Clear plug-in, for $49.

To install, download and run the executable program file, choose your language (English, German, French, Portuguese, and Spanish are available). Check boxes let me set it to work in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. After this quick setup, I could invoke the plug-in from within Lightroom and Photoshop.

How Perfectly Clear Works

Most serious photographers have a set process for getting their photos looking better. I'm probably not alone in having spent many minutes adjusting Lightroom or Photoshop slider controls trying to get a single image looking just right. Another approach is to start out by trying the auto-exposure button in Lightroom, Capture One, or DxO Optics Pro. You could think of Perfectly Clear as a whole program designed for just that one function—auto correction. It makes changes to an image's brightness, contrast, color, and sharpness based on eye science, according to Athentech.

To start Perfectly Clear from a photo view in Lightroom, I right-clicked and chose to open the plug-in, which offered choices of TIFF, JPG, and PSD file formats, but I could only edit a copy that included the already-applied Lightroom corrections, which makes sense. In Photoshop, you open the plug-in from the Athentech section of the Filter menu and can choose to edit a copy or the original. The Lucid apps don't accept raw camera files.

Interface

Perfectly Clear's interface still needs a little work. The program had an issue with my 4K display. Its interface is on the tiny side in 4K, unlike Lightroom, which adapts to high-resolution displays. Of course, that's only a problem for you if you have a 4K monitor. Mac Retina displays work fine with the plug-in. But there's no full-screen window option, which would be useful. And it would be great if there were fit and fill zooming options. You can, however, use the mouse wheel to (slowly) zoom in and out, and also to zoom to and above 100 percent—something you really want, particularly for noise reduction and sharpening. One missing element is a throbber that tells you when an adjustment is complete.

Six preset buttons offer Details, Vivid, Beautify, Beautify+, Fix Dark, Fix Noise, Fix Tint, and Landscapes corrections. The right-hand sidebar where these buttons live can be switched to Adjust view, which offers lots of control siders for standard tone and color adjustments, along with Perfectly Clear's specialty adjustments like smoothing, teeth whitening, and eye enhancing. Split screen views helpfully let you see the before and after views. After you accept your edits and return to Photoshop, you can still Undo the edits made by Perfectly Clear.

Effectiveness

In its Default mode, Perfectly Clear improved just about every photo I threw at it. Of course, the old "garbage in, garbage out" rule still applies, so don't expect an awful image to magically look good. The plug-in often made good test photos look stunning. If you're not happy with the preset result, you do have adjustment choices: Sliders let you control exposure and contrast, as well as sharpening and noise. But even if you just open your photo in Perfectly Clear, if you use the side-by-side before and after view, your original image will in most cases look washed out and flat in comparison.

The presets for common applications—Landscapes, Portrait, Noise Removal, Fix Dark, and Tint Removal—were effective. Hovering your mouse pointer over the selected preset pops up a lengthy tooltip telling you what it does. For example, the tooltip for Landscape tells you that the setting doesn't increase contrast as much and adds vibrancy for more vivid colors.

The Fix Tint preset button is pretty impressive. Often a camera's automatic setting gets the color temperature wrong, such as in the left side of the test image below. Perfectly Clear was automatically able to detect that the lighting was miscalculated and remove the yellow-orange tint for a more realistic result. The default Fix Details option perfectly removed red eye flash without needing any help with finding the eyes.

Portaits are one of Perfectly Clear's top assignments, and it works quite well on this. The Beautify and Beautify+ presets give you good options. Both smooth out skin, removing most blemishes, and the + version actually reshapes the face to reduce hamster-like cheeks. Additional Preset groups such as Perfect Eyes offer useful tools for portrait photographers, such as corrections for "racoon eyes," "gentle children," and "eagle eyes."

Color options include Vibrancy and Fidelity, and whenever you adjust either these or the lighting sliders, your Preset dropdown changes to Custom. When this happens, you get the chance to create a new preset of your own, with a new name and description.

Noise reduction is another option, and the software offers correction options for Portraits, Night Scenes, and Camera Phones, along with sliders for strength and details. A Strongest option lets you smooth out even the most speckled images. It's about as effective as Lightroom's built-in noise reduction, which has improved greatly over the last few years, though not quite as strong as that of Noise Ninja or DxO Optics Pro.

Is It Perfect?

Perfectly Clear can deliver instant improvements to your photos, making your pictures look better with minimal effort. And if you're not pleased with the automatic results, it offers adjustment sliders for fine-tuning. I have some problems with the interface, and you can get similar results with standard photo software like Lightroom, using sharpening, contrast, color, and noise reduction. But with standard photo editing software alone, you'd have to fuss with sliders and adjustments more to get those results. With Perfectly Clear, you see improvements with one press of a button. I recommend Perfectly Clear, and you can try it for free, but Editors' Choice DxO Optics Pro offers similar one-tap improvements with even more power and in a better-designed interface.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine?s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine?s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine?s Solutions section, which covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered services and software for ExtremeTech.com.
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